10 December 2017 12:02 AM

How clever of the Defence Ministry to tell Chancellor Philip Hammond to pay his overdue bills if he wants to carry on flying in RAF planes.

The only problem with the plan is that Mr Hammond will simply whisk the cash out of your pocket and mine, and carry on as before, sinking into the leather seats of Her Majesty’s executive jets and avoiding the normal horrors of travel.

I have never understood why politicians get these privileges. The excuse of ‘security’ is in reality very thin. The risk to them isn’t all that great. Most are so obscure that they could pass unrecognised in any high street.

As far as I know, even Prime Ministers did not get government cars until the 1930s. In 1924, Ramsay MacDonald used to travel to Downing Street by Underground train from his modest North London home.

Quite right, too. If you claim to represent and speak for the people, and they are forced to pay your salary, you have a duty to experience life as near as possible to the way others live it.

So let them all travel by train and bus, paying their own fares unless it’s on official business. Close the parliamentary car park for ever. If MPs want to drive cars in congested London, that is fine by me, even though I think it mad, but let them do it just like everyone else, searching for parking spaces and paying for them.

If they can’t reopen all those lost village and suburban post offices, then they should also close Par liament’s own post office. Why should they keep what they have withdrawn from the rest of us?

Let their computer broadband speed be no higher than the slowest in the country. Close most of the Westminster bars. What other workplace has an open-all-hours bar on the premises?

And why should politicians, of all people, have special protection, when the police largely ignore the rest of us? If they reintroduce proper police foot patrols, then they can have a police presence at Westminster. Not otherwise.

They should also be forced, as we all are, to be treated like criminals, searched, photographed, compelled to remove coats and belts before they can get inside the many security cordons they have imposed on us. Every time. They should go through the same procedure at airports, too. And in that I most definitely include Cabinet Ministers, right up to the top. In a supposedly free and equal country, there is no excuse for our rulers having VIP treatment. On the contrary, there is every reason for them to get what we get, hot and strong.

The worst country I ever lived in, the old USSR, was crammed with privileges for the political elite. They had their own hospital, their own shops, country houses and blocks of flats, special lanes on the streets so they could bypass the traffic in their special cars. They had their own holiday homes, their own waiting rooms at stations and airports, their own planes and reserved carriages. It was a wonderful life – for them.

But they became completely unaware of what was going on in the rest of the country, and by the time they realised it was headed for catastrophe, it was far too late.

Christine Keeler’s night in my bed (I bet that woke you up)

Christine Keeler once slept in my bed. There, I’ve got your attention. The story, though perfectly true, is completely unimportant and dull. I was hundreds of miles away at the time (the bed was in Moscow, and she spent a chaste night there).

But the very words ‘Christine Keeler’ or ‘Profumo’ still have the power to make people sit up and listen. This is such a pity.

The Profumo affair, one of the few bits of recent history anyone knows, was among the biggest non-events of all time. Poor Miss Keeler, God rest her soul, was only interested in clothes and make-up and couldn’t have told a nuclear secret from the formula for knicker elastic.

I once also met Captain Eugene Ivanov, the Soviet spy to whom she was supposed to have whispered what she had learned from Profumo, the Minister for War. I beg leave to doubt this. The two barely had a common language. Supposed ‘experts’ nowadays claim that Ivanov revealed later in life that he had done serious spying, photographing secret documents. Well, the Ivanov I met at this time (weirdly, in the middle of a park in the Soviet capital, with everyone involved looking over their shoulders) was a pathetic husk, his memory filled with fog, babbling vaguely about long-ago diplomatic parties. Believe what you want. I know what I think.

There were far bigger scandals at the time that we ought to care about, including the shocking Marples affair. This was a grave disgrace. The Transport Minister who wrecked the railways, a policy now universally known to be a disaster, was the boss of a motorway building firm. Such a coincidence.

Hardly anyone knows that Ernest Marples ended up skipping the country (on a train, ironically) to escape an enormous tax bill. And don’t get me started on the scandal of the grammar schools, smashed up on an ignorant whim by expensively educated idiots.

But I’ve already lost your attention again. Important things are doomed to be boring.

*****

Former Tory Minister Crispin Blunt, his career stalled, has begun calling for the decriminalisation and ‘regulation’ of marijuana. Immediately, the BBC had him on to talk about it.

What are these people thinking? Tobacco is decriminalised, yet criminal gangs still smuggle cigarettes. And it is ‘regulated’ and yet it still kills.

Above all, being on open sale, it is far more widely used than any illegal drug. Drug liberalisers can get away with any old rubbish on the BBC. Why ever is that?

The real scandal about ‘Marxist’ Milburn

The BBC and the Left-wing media made a huge fuss about the resignation of Alan Milburn as ‘Social Mobility Tsar’. But why do we have a ‘Social Mobility Tsar’ anyway, and who is Alan Milburn?

‘Social mobility’ in this case means stirring up prejudice against supposedly ‘posh’ children whose parents have in many cases near-bankrupted themselves to pay school fees to ensure their offspring get a reasonable education. This results in quotas which mainly benefit children from rich Left-wing homes, where the parents have bought expensive houses in the catchment areas of the minority of good state schools. All ‘egalitarian’ systems have this fiddle built into them.

Mr Milburn, who refuses to tell me where his own children went to school, is – like me, Anthony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Stephen Byers, John Reid, Bob Ainsworth and Alistair Darling – a former revolutionary Marxist. I am the odd one out in this group for three reasons.

First, I was never a Labour Cabinet Minister. Second, I am always entirely open about my past. Third, I publicly regret and reject my former views.

Whenever Mr Milburn pops up, I wonder two things. Why do people think New Labour was Right wing and why did a nominally Tory government give an important public post to such a man?

Share this article:

15 May 2017 2:50 PM

I have now finally managed to watch the BBC TV version of Mike Bartlett’s interesting play, ‘King Charles III’ . I saw it on the stage, with Robert Powell in the title role, at the Chichester Festival Theatre a while ago, and preferred the stage version – in which, as far as I can recall, the fictional Charles is *not* shown as saying ‘At last!’ as he contemplates the death of his mother. Nor is this in the original script, or at least if it is I cannot find it. So why did the TV version include it? I do weary of this ‘Private Eye’ view of Charles, as a man frantically waiting to succeed. I have my criticisms of the Prince of Wales, but I am completely unable to believe that he yearns for the death of his own mother.

In fact, as I explain below, I suspect Charles is increasingly contented with his role as heir. He must know that the end of his mother’s reign, which is of course inevitable, will be a severe crisis for the monarchy and so, if he lives that long, which is of course by no means certain, for him, a heavy burden for him personally when he is by no means young and vigorous . Michael Dobbs’s original fantasy on this subject, which I mention below, is now positively ancient. Many elderly gentlemen who wrote obituaries of the late Queen Mother died long before their words were eventually published. If we can speculate on the lives and deaths of others at all, which these dramas rather compel us to do, then why should we assume that Charles will necessarily outlive Elizabeth II?.

Mr Bartlett’s play, in blank verse, is very clever. But it is not a wholly original idea. Something quite similar was done in Michael (now Lord) Dobbs’s ‘To Play the King’, a book and then a TV drama, back in the 1990s. Once again a crisis was foreseen between Charles, newly King and impelled by a powerful conscience, and an unscrupulous Tory Premier. Once again, Charles lost the struggle and abdicated in favour of his own son.

In the Mike Bartlett version, the issue is a very clever one, namely, press freedom, much more cunningly chosen than the general vague differences in the Dobbs book. In my view, Mr Bartlett actually shies away from the conclusions of his own plot. Surely, if a government was proposing criminal penalties on journalists, as are mentioned in the Bartlett play, Fleet Street would be lined up against this, along with quite a lot of academic, legal and other influential opinion?

If the King refused to give his assent to such a law, he would not be alone. And if he dissolved Parliament rather than be forced to assent, how would the election then go? A King’s Party might be a good deal broader and deeper than the shouty republicans who Mr Bartlett portrays as taking to the streets to call for the King’s removal.

And I really do not believe that Charles or anyone in his position would permit tanks to be parked in the forecourt of Buckingham Palace to defend himself against such mobs.

I think Mr Bartlett has got carried away by the Shakespearean examples he seeks to follow, what with the ghost of Diana giving cryptic and easily misunderstood advice, and treacherous courtiers and princes ( and princesses) at every corner.

In real life, a well-chosen combat of this kind might well end up strengthening the Palace against Downing Street, as wise politicians well know. But it would have to *be* well-chosen.

The real problem for the Monarchy is not this at all. It is that the British people are no longer really grown-up enough to have a monarchy any more, and this will be brought home very coldly when the current monarch leaves us alone in a cold and altered world.

Hardly anyone grasps the simple point made recently by Prince Philip, that the monarchy exists for the benefit of the people, not for its own benefit. His own life, dutiful and taken up almost entirely with serving the interests of others, is a complete demonstration of this .

Yet millions think that the monarchy is a crude thing, a mixture of a Ruritanian playboy house and a Bourbon tyranny, living in gross luxury on the taxes of a groaning populace, while enjoying unfettered power. They absurdly think the monarchy is expensive, when it costs the taxpayer next to nothing, that it is luxury-loving, when the monarch lives frugally in small apartments in vast, decaying mansions, that it is snobbish, when the monarchy’s modern roots lie precisely in the bond between the Crown and the East End of London, forged in the 1940-41 Blitz. And its most fervent supporters have always been among the poorest, who have for centuries seen the Crown as a last court of appeal against the powerful. And they think it possesses secret, sinister power when in fact it is largely ignored.

The Coronation will be the moment at which the difference between the dead and gone Britain which understood and accepted a monarch, and the modern country, largely indifferent to and ignorant of monarchy, is demonstrated.

This ritual (you may read the service on the Internet, and there is a pretty full recording of the actual ceremony commercially available) simply could not take place today.

It is fiercely Protestant, aristocratic, proudly backward-looking, monocultural, conservative, traditional and, in its essence, harsh. At its heart are the sword of state and the Cross of Christ, justice tempered with mercy, and the rule of law. The modern world doesn’t much like any of these things, and if Charles wants to jettison quite a few of them, he won’t be opposed by the government or the church or the media, or the Equalities commissars. The real problem is that Charles, who is fashionably caught up in the real religion of our age, man-made climate change, is himself a pestilential innovator. And the crisis will not be between him and his ministers, but between him and the ghosts of his ancestors.

And his monarchy will be the empty plastic thing which his fictional character denounces in the closing scenes of ‘Charles III’. But then it very nearly is already. It is only the last trailing wisps and rags of majesty, like those ancient transparent battle-flags you find in cathedrals, left over from the imperial age and still clinging to crown and throne, which remind us of what a serious monarchy was once like. They symbolise a country which sees in its own revered monarch (regardless of his or her character) a living symbol of its sovereignty over itself, a free self-governing people with no other overlord, except God. They will soon be in a museum, where almost everyone except me thinks they belong.

Whereas egalitarian utopianism, which *ought* to be in a museum, if not in a hermetically sealed and guarded vault to prevent it from rising again, continues to flourish in the open air.

Share this article:

08 May 2017 3:49 PM

As we digest the very strange French Presidential election (which ended with huge abstentions and, I believe, a record number of spoiled ballots) I thought it might be a good moment to reflect once again on the strange and in my view failed experiment in universal suffrage democracy which has troubled the free and unfree worlds for about a century.

In the free world this has sometimes destroyed freedom. In Weimar Germany a democratically-agreed constitution, employed by a democratically-elected President supervising a democratically-elected Parliament, was used to snuff out liberty in a matter of months. I suspect there are other instances of this, such as the Italian Parliament's passage of the Acerbo Law in November 1923, a law whose only and obvious purpose was to ensure a Fascist majority in the elections which followed soon afterwards.

Of course in the unfree world the difficulties of universal suffrage are made very much simpler by making sure that only one party stands, or that rival parties are bound to lose. In the free world, other ways have to be found to frustrate the popular will - elaborate lies, fiddled statistics, unfair media, advertising, unfair funding, you name it. Even where these things operate, the fact that the result cannot be wholly fixed, and that there are at least two adversarial parties, creates a pocket of liberty in which many good things survive. But that, of course, was the case before we ever had universal suffrage (which only really arrived here in 1950 after the abolition in 1948 of the old University seats).

I’ve discussed this liberty versus democracy problem before, prompted in my mind long ago by a nagging doubt which grew in my mind as I pondered the seeming anomaly of Hong Kong

Note my remarks on the Muslim Brotherhood, rather prophetic for 2007, though I would now (in the light of later research) revise some of my thoughts about Singapore and the Battle of Britain.

I then found that the history of free countries was by no means a story of perfect congruence between universal suffrage and liberty. As usual, what I had stumbled on was not new at all, but an old debate, largely forgotten.

Yesterday(Sunday 7th May) I came across another aspect of this anomaly, in an old programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Pick of the Week’ and drawn to my attention by an later reader:

At seven minutes into this http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08p5kym#play you will find the late Alistair Cooke explaining how the USA comes to have an electoral college, which takes the formal decision on who becomes President.

He notes of the constitutional convention which came up with it 'Of all the forms of government they were considering,[in the spring of 1787] democracy was the one they most wanted to avoid'. 'George Washington said : "Accounted by civil societies it [democracy]is the worst and nastiest kind of government"’.

James Madison and Alexander Hamilton devised the original Electoral College (of independent and incorruptible , thus wealthy men of virtue and merit) as a precaution against ‘the worst of democracy’s threats, tyranny and majority rule’. Thus was founded the nation now regarded as the world's greatest democracy.

A few years ago, during a BBC Question Time programme, I encountered alarm and scorn among fellow guests, when I mischievously suggested that total democracy might not be a good thing, and said I was pleased that there were restraints on it in our constitution.

These days, now that the Left have been badly bruised by universal suffrage in the EU referendum and the Donald Trump election, I find that I have more sympathy on this subject than I want or need, from people who would once have regarded my opinion as ‘fascist’. ( I should point out here that the USA’s electoral college did *not* play the active restraining role envisaged by Madison and Hamilton in this choice. It just passively let arithmetic do the job. Likewise, the English courts offered the shadow of Parliamentary supremacy, not its substance, when judging Parliament's duties after the EU referendum. Who now dares defy the gods of democracy?).

You might think Emmanuel Macron’s victory (not really a surprise) over Marine le Pen puts an end to all this left-wing moaning about the people's will being pretty awful. But I don’t think it does. Five years hence we will see the whole thing again, and then what?

France’s story is far from over. I cannot see how Emmanuel Macron’s Presidency can be anything other than a failure. He comes from exactly the same elite school as all the other recent failures, he is in fact a strong supporter of France’s EU-loving metropolitan left, which has made such a mess of things for the past 20 years or so, and he largely owes his position to the uncritical support of France’s elite left-wing media, which applauded him into office and savaged his only mainstream conservative rival, Francois Fillon.

Fillon, interestingly, was not part of the French elite of ‘Enarques’, graduates of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration, France’s closest equivalent (though a much more tightly-knit group) to studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Oxford. A few years at the ENA is generally the precondition for high office for Left and Right alike. Fillon, an unashamed Christian and also a supporter of a rapprochement with Russia, was not supposed to win the Republican primary against Alain Juppe ( an Enarque) . I am fairly sure that this was why Fillon was destroyed by scandals of the sort which are overlooked in most French politicians. Had the more conventional Juppe been selected by the Republican Party, , I also wonder if Emanuel Macron would have gained the approbation of the French media.

Macron, though he has been a Minister (for economy and finance) in a Socialist government and worked very closely (as deputy secretary general of the Elysee Palace staff) with the outgoing Socialist president Francois Hollande, is officially non-party. Now what will he do? He has no party in the National Assembly, so he will need to pay his debts to the Socialists and others whose support he must have to run any kind of government. This does not seem to give him very much freedom of movement, even if he has any serious plans to change anything fundamental.

Ms le Pen has meanwhile seized , probably permanently, a large chunk of the old Communist and Socialist vote, and allied it to rural conservatism. If she were not burdened with the squalid associations of the French right, she would have got much further. I should say here that this is a genuine problem. French anti-Jacobin conservatism, tested during the Hitler era, mostly failed that test. It was already tainted by its Judophobia and injustice during the Dreyfus affair, when a Jewish army officer was wrongly convicted of espionage for Germany, and the French right sided with the injustice because of its strong Judophobic tendencies. But its support for Petain was far, far worse than mere stupidity and injustice. The Vichy state’s enthusiastic adoption of anti-Jewish measures (more than the Nazis asked for) remains the irremovable stain on that part of the French Right.

Marine le Pen was born into that part of the French Right, and so was her party. The years cannot wipe away the problem. Her father’s crass opinions are well-known. She has, reasonably, denounced him and distanced herself from him. But I cannot see how she can ever escape from that ancestry, though she is obviously trying very hard to do so, denouncing her own father and distancing herself from the Front National in the final stages of the poll.

Assume this is sincere, as it is only fair to do, and you are still left with a movement stuffed with apologists for Vichy, or people who at best want to avoid the subject of the Jewish roundups or claim they were not really the actions of a true French state. Countries that have been occupied by Nazis are countries in which patriotic conservatism is all too often tainted by the war years (see also Belgium, especially Flanders)

And yet it is that movement which has now won a near-monopoly of French discontent with the failures of the 5th Republic, the evaporating jobs, the mass unemployment among the young, the stifling bureaucracy and regulation, the petty crime, the stagnant economy, the increasing submission to an almighty Germany, and to an almighty USA, the uncontrolled immigration and the unassimilated Muslim minority.

Unless Emmanuel Macron really does have some brilliant plan for coping with all these difficulties, Ms le Pen (or someone like her), and the Front National (or something like it) will be waiting for him five years hence, bigger, more discontented, more experienced. Its day may well come.

And here’s the problem. Under universal suffrage democracy, there has been a collusion between leaders and voters for a long time. We, the voters, have pretended to believe that our chosen party will liberate us from our woes, make genuine and profound changes for the better in our lives. They have pretended to do so. In truth, for many years, they have not fulfilled their promises, and we have not really expected them to do so. But in the long calm prosperity that endured from 1950 till about 2000 it didn’t matter very much.

Now it does. That prosperity is evaporating. How will we afford homes? Where are the secure jobs? Will our children end up as coolies, toiling in sweatshops for pittances like their Chinese coevals? Will anyone be able to afford to retire? Can the welfare state, which we have grown used to, survive? Will we be replaced by robots, or by a new immigrant from the Middle East? Will the annual holidays we have taken for granted still be affordable? And what about these wars of choice our leaders keep starting? Nothing, large or small, looks secure. And so the ‘we’ll pretend to believe your promises’ arrangement is breaking down.

Worse, what I have long regarded as the idolatrous false religion of politics, under which governments took over from God as the object of petitions and the main source of bounty, is actually collapsing. It is morally unsustainable. The voters, repeatedly deceived by false election pledges and having had their hopes repeatedly raised and dashed, now assume not only that they are being lied to but that their leaders are mostly in it for the money.

They see the enormous fortunes amassed by the Clintons and by Anthony Blair since they left office, they see that Barack Obama, for a single speech to a Wall Street concern, can be paid as much as he earned in a year as President of the USA, and they feel a righteous disgust.

When Harry Truman left the White House in 1953, he had nothing to live on but his old U.S. Army pension of $112-56 a month, earned during his World War One service. Had it not been for some property inherited from his mother, and a book deal modest by today's standards, he would have had to seek welfare payments to survive. It was only after this that an official US presidential pension ( now about $200,000 a year) was introduced. Most British premiers likewise went off into modest retirement. Not any longer. (I make a strong exception here for Gordon Brown, who, as far as I know, passes his speaking fees to charitable bodies) .

I think the contract between rulers and electors which has sustained universal suffrage democracy for the last century or so is breaking down. It was fundamentally cynical. At its highest level it involved people agreeing to be bribed with their own money, and of course with the money of others too. Now that money has run out, the bribes are dwindling and the promises have to be vaguer and more poorly costed, or they just have to be broken(like the absurd Tory pledge on limiting immigration, a zombie of a promise, which still grimly walks the earth long after it ought to have been buried six feet under).

It ends with the election of Donal Trump in the USA, an election which can’t and won’t deliver what it promised. What then? How will the illusion of choice be preserved at the next US presidential election? Likewise the presentation of leaving the EU as a simple, swift act, which somehow took hold during the referendum. And now, the growing shadows around the French Fifth Republic, which surely cannot survive in this form much longer?

Perhaps we will end up with the German system, where they have elections but the same group of people always end up in office with the same policies, and nobody can be in the government until he or she has already been in the government. But would anyone but the Germans, once described by John le Carre as having quite a bit of democracy but not many democrats, put up with this? Or perhaps we will wonder afresh why we ignored the wisdom of the ages, and took this strange route in the first place.

23 April 2017 2:47 AM

This is a flap election, not a snap election. It has been called to get the Government out of what might be serious legal trouble. I am amazed this has not attracted more attention.It is this simple. The Crown Prosecution Service is now looking at the cases of 30, yes 30, Tory MPs and agents, who have been investigated for breaking spending rules at the last General Election.The allegations have been probed by 14 police forces after claims that the Conservatives’ ‘battlebus’ campaign broke legal spending limits in several key marginal seats.The Tories have already been in deep trouble over their new election techniques, where busloads of outsiders flood into winnable seats to round up crucial extra votes. This was a way of making up for the Tory party’s severe loss of active members, who used to do this donkey work. But it is sailing very close to the legal wind. Last month they were hit by the Electoral Commission with a record £70,000 fine – the maximum – for failing to declare their spending. The forces involved are Avon & Somerset, Cumbria, Derbyshire, Devon & Cornwall, Gloucestershire, Greater Manchester, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire, West Mercia, West Midlands, West Yorkshire and the Met.These cases are likely to result in some charges (I have no idea how many) in the next few weeks, probably just before polling day. Trials, assuming these go ahead, will be much later in the year and might not reach verdicts until well into 2018. If there had been no election, any convictions could have meant MPs found guilty being forced to stand down, and elections being rerun. A General Election makes this much less of a threat, especially if Mrs May manages to increase her meagre majority. This menace has been worrying the Cabinet for some months, as it has become clear it will not go away. And it is a far better explanation of the Prime Minister’s change of heart than her rather weird and incoherent speech in Downing Street. I happen to think she is a naturally truthful person and meant what she said when she previously declared several times that she was going to stay on till 2020. But the expenses allegations, which started as a cloud on the horizon no bigger than a man’s hand, have grown and grown. I suspect her advisers have been telling her she cannot risk them coming into the open late in a Parliament when, perhaps, the economy is not doing well, or EU negotiations are going badly or Labour has a new leader.As a result of this semi-secret crisis, the Tory campaign this time will have to be a good deal more cautious about such things, which may weaken it, especially if the campaign goes wrong – and this is not impossible. Even now the affair could be highly damaging – but early in a new Parliament, with a secure majority, the Government should be able to weather it far better than if Mrs May had soldiered on. But all elections are risks. It is amazing how often governments lose control of them. Politics in this country are a good deal less solid and stable than they seem.

Guilty - of wrecking our values

I only watched Broadchurch, ITV’s Leftist feminist crime saga, to the end because it was so awful, and to make sure it never backtracked on its nasty, biased opening scenes, in which police officers quite wrongly declared that they ‘believed’ an alleged victim, which is emphatically not their job. The culprit turned out to be that staple of the dud crime story, a secretly mad person whose actions couldn’t have been guessed at or predicted. There were no normal men. The most prominent Christian character was a weirdo. The police had dysfunctional families, yet lectured citizens on their private conduct. I couldn’t fathom why until it dawned on me that they were snarling at male suspects for not being feminist enough.The rape itself was that very rare event, a violent attack on a woman by a stranger in the open. Ninety per cent of alleged rapes in the UK are committed by people known to the victim, and bear no resemblance to Broadchurch. If they did, there would be a higher conviction rate, I think. This stuff matters. People know little of the lives of others and dramas such as this make them think the world is worse than it is. They also undermine the beliefs and morals of those who don’t share the modern, progressive ideas of TV executives. And I think that is what they are meant to do.

19 March 2017 12:41 AM

I wonder if the Tories are beginning to wish they had not tried quite so hard to win the 2015 Election. Think of all the mess and humiliation they would have been spared if they hadn’t.

I do not think they won it ‘fairly and squarely’, as David Cameron ludicrously said on Thursday. I don’t think he thinks so either, really. And things which are wrongly come by tend to turn to dust and ashes in the hands of those who have schemed to get them.

So it is in this case. I have long believed that Mr Cameron did not intend or expect to win a majority. He wanted a second coalition, which could cast aside his insincere promise to hold an EU referendum and his impractical pledge to freeze taxes and National Insurance.

Now look what has happened – the most ridiculous government in modern history, flailing about as it tries to obey a referendum verdict it hates, and abandoning its Budget within hours of issuing it.

The silly manifesto the Tories threw together in 2015 was never meant to be put into action and has been nothing but trouble. I wonder what other nasty surprises are lurking in its yellowing pages.

A sour and persistent smell, like the whiff from a neglected fridge, now hangs over the Government. The £70,000 fine imposed on the supposedly professional Tory Party, for blatantly breaking Election rules, may only be the start of an enormous landslide of scandal and embarrassment, dragging on for years to come and reaching into very high places.

I cannot ever remember this country feeling so much like a Latin American banana republic. All we need to complete the picture is some bananas, and some hyper-inflation.

And who knows if we cannot contrive that, too? After the 2008 crash, the Queen asked why nobody saw it coming. Well, after the next crash, which is just a matter of time, perhaps I will be here to tell her that I saw it coming. Anyone who can count can see it coming, if he wants.

And the mess we are making of leaving the EU may help that along. How much are we going to have to pay to get access to the Single Market we could have stayed in by joining the European Economic Area?

How on earth are we going to keep the United Kingdom in one piece by being rigid and stubborn? If I were Scottish, I would be infuriated by Theresa May’s refusal to allow another vote on independence.

'How on earth are we going to keep the United Kingdom in one piece by being rigid and stubborn? If I were Scottish, I would be infuriated by Theresa May’s refusal to allow another vote on independence'

This is false toughness. English foot-stamping does not go down well in today’s Scotland. The last thing we should do is encourage an emotional campaign based on wounded pride rather than on hard facts.

What if it goes wrong and there is an overwhelming unofficial vote to leave? Surely a better approach would be to be as generous as possible, to say: ‘Of course you must be free to vote. We are friends who have fought alongside each other for centuries, and trust each other completely. And if you really wish to go, that is your affair. That is the kind of people we are. But we hope that you won’t and will always welcome you back if you change your minds.’

As for Ireland, I simply cannot see why the Government is so complacent about the seething crisis that is building up there over the prospect of a nightmare hard border from Warrenpoint to Londonderry. There is real danger here, and it had better be faced soon.

The pathetic tale of HMS Dunroamin

The woeful state of Her Majesty’s Navy is a national shame. Every government that has failed to keep up the strength of the Fleet has paid for it in the end, and it is ridiculous for a trading nation such as we are to neglect seapower.

The mean folly of Labour and Tory governments is now doing lasting damage to both Army and Navy, sawing into their very bone to save money. The crucial thing that is being lost is the accumulated experience of centuries, passed on by a solid core of trained men. If this goes on, we’ll end up with as much Naval tradition and prowess as Luxembourg.

And the shortage of skilled sailors has now led to the inexcusable waste of a £1billion stealth warship, HMS Dauntless.

The immensely expensive Type 45 destroyer, which went into service in 2010, hasn’t moved an inch under her own power for a whole year. She is stuck, tied up at her Portsmouth berth.

She is officially described as a ‘training ship’, a role normally taken by worn-out and obsolete vessels. A Navy statement lamely insists the ship is still ‘very much part of the fleet… an important part of our drive to improve training and career opportunities’.

I think we may need to change our ship-naming policy. Away with the romantic titles of old. Instead we can have HMS Motionless, HMS Deficit, HMS Mothballs and HMS Dunroamin.

The West kills civilians just like 'evil' Putin

In what important way is the West’s bombing of Mosul, now going on, different from Russian bombing of Aleppo last December?

In both cases, heavily armed and ruthless Islamist fanatics have used civilians as human shields as they fight to the finish in thickly populated city streets and backyards.

In both cases, innocent civilians have, regrettably, died or been badly injured in the bombardment. In Mosul, estimates are that at least 300 civilians have already died during Western air attacks on Islamic State positions.

Most of us would accept, with a heavy heart, that this is the horrible price we have to pay for the defeat of IS. But when Russian forces did the same in Aleppo, the action was denounced almost everywhere as a hideous and deliberate war crime.

What’s the reason? In my view, it’s propaganda – and some of the media’s gullible willingness to believe it. IS’s close cousins, the bearded zealots of the Al-Nusra Front, used sophisticated techniques to persuade journalists (almost all far away from the scene) that the Russians were the bad guys.

So we ended with democratic, Western media, normally busy denouncing Islamist extremism, giving sympathetic coverage to some of the worst jihadists in the world. When Mosul falls, as it will, and those who defeated IS are applauded, as they will rightly be, please think about this.

*******

Why should Hollywood Royalty be 'nervous?

Apparently the actress Angelina Jolie ‘confessed to feeling a little nervous’ as she arrived to give her first lecture as a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. I can’t think why. Hollywood Royalty, like Rock Royalty, are surrounded by automatic fawning and applause, much as actual aristocrats used to be worshipped by servile snobs in the old days. Embarrassed, perhaps. Nervous, never.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down

Share this article:

30 January 2017 12:52 PM

I grow more and more baffled by the priorities of the news world. Last week the chief of Britain’s electronic spying agency, GCHQ, quit without warning or adequate reason. Robert Hannigan, we were briefly told, left his ultra-sensitive £160,000-a- year post after just two years for ‘personal reasons’ . Mr Hannigan is 51 and has previously worked as ‘director general of defence and intelligence’ at the Foreign Office. He can hardly have expected the GCHQ job to allow him to spend a lot of time at home with his family. One has to suspect a controversy. (***NOTE: On Monday 30th January Charles Moore in his Daily Telegraph column said Mr Hannigan had retired because of a 'family illness'. I have not seen any other reference to this, and was not aware of it when I wrote the article. PH***)

But far more has been written in the British press about the departure of Alexandra Shulman as editor of Vogue than about the departure of Robert Hannigan as boss of GCHQ.

Now we are all in a tizz about President Trump’s (frankly bizarre) executive orders about immigration.

Just because a lot of squeaky liberals are against these measures, it does not mean they are sensible or right. Indeed, this must be the wise person’s motto in dealing with all controversies of the Trump presidency.

As someone who has for some time openly expressed doubts about the virtue of universal suffrage democracy, and suggested ways by which it could be moderated, I am stuck in a paradox.

The people who are now most appalled by the effects of that universal suffrage democracy are exactly the same people who used to gasp or mutter ‘fascist’ when I suggested that it might have risks.

Yet here I am, annoying my own supporters by refusing to support or take part in the EU referendum, and expressing doubts about the outcome; and also annoying some of my regular readers by failing to fall in love with Mr Trump.

It isn’t Mr Trump’s politics that put me off. There’s no point telling me that he has been sound on some topic or other where we seem to share a view. I don’t think he really has any politics, apart from a vague and ill-thought-out opposition to free trade. That’s why I am not specially heartened by the occasional sensible things he has said (and now retracted or forgotten) about Russia and NATO. I suspected, and events have so far proved me right, that the foreign policy establishment would rapidly turn him into a reliable Natopolitan, gargling on about the need to defend Europe from a non-existent Russian threat.

He is learning what his minders will put up with, and what they won’t. He managed to tame himself quite effectively during Mrs May’s visit, which I think will come to be seen as a premature mistake, over time.

His cautious behaviour was presumably caused by his desire to spend a night in Buckingham Palace and have his picture taken with the Queen. He is, I think, in the White House as a rather grand souvenir-collector (he keeps the lunch-menus, we learned at the weekend) . I have long thought that when he has got enough such souvenirs, he will leave, and so become the first President to resign the office voluntarily.

The NATO issue was resolved because it really matters to his minders and doesn’t really matter to him. He’d like to have people tortured . He’s probably seen ‘Jack Bauer’ on the TV in ‘24’ saving America by torturing people. He may even get his ‘ideas’ from such shows) . His occasional escapes over the White House wall will in future be on other subjects, as we saw on Saturday. He can do damage, but as long as he does not upset the juggernaut of continuing policy, they can put up with quite a bit of this.

NATO *is* obsolete. A child could see it. You might as well maintain an alliance against the Austro-Hungarian Empire as maintain an alliance against the Soviet Union. Both have vanished, and their successor states bear no relation to the empires they once ruled.

Worse, an alliance against Russia, which in 1991 withdrew into the narrowest borders it could possibly tolerate, has to be aggressive, not defensive. The former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, writing in ‘Time’ magazine, is plainly greatly alarmed, saying : ‘Politicians and military leaders sound increasingly belligerent and defence doctrines more dangerous. Commentators and TV personalities are joining the bellicose chorus. It all looks as if the world is preparing for war.’ Mr Gorbachev is one of the last really big people alive in world politics. If he thinks so, it’s worth worrying.

NATO’s chief virtue was that it was unarguably defensive. Now it is an aggressive body, promoting the very tension it claims to soothe, like a quack doctor keeping his patient ill to ensure that he carries on buying the expensive drugs he sells, and attending the costly appointments.

But Mr Trump has now clearly given up his childishly clear vision, and his sensible view that it is obsolete, , and become one of the conformist grown-ups, believing and repeating the official untruth. The Emperor has a very fine suit of clothes, after all. I’ve long thought and said the Andersen story about the Emperor’s clothes ended misleadingly. In real life the little boy and his family would have been attacked by the crowd, arrested, tortured and then (when the bruises had faded), paraded to confirm that the Emperor’s new clothes were very fine indeed, before being exiled to some pig-farm.

Now we get this stuff about banning Muslims. My response? It just isn’t serious, even though it affects quite a lot of individuals very seriously indeed. I am hilariously accused on this blog of being in some unexplained way a sympathiser with Islam, and no doubt what I say now will thicken and deepen this particular stream of ignorant, stupid drivel. My actual position is that ,if the ‘west’ really wishes to limit the influence of Islam over its societies, it needs to rediscover the Christian faith in a big way. And that crude, ignorant attacks on Muslims themselves naturally make any intelligent open-minded person come to their defence when he can, whatever he thinks of their faith.

And as long as the ‘west’ doesn’t rediscover Christianity, it flails dangerously about, mistaking strength and wealth for virtue. It puts its faith in reeking tube and iron shard, in bigger weapons, and in ‘tougher’ ‘securidee’ (which bears the same relation to true security as does ‘charidee’ to true charity), in consumer goods and in its own luxurious hedonism. This will not work. As I’ve said before, when George W. Bush used to say that Muslim militants ‘hate our way of life’, I could not forebear to chime in ‘But I also hate our way of life!’.

For I do. The ‘West’ only exists as a coherent part of the world because of the Christian morals, and the extremely high levels of trust and lawfulness based upon them, which allowed Europe and the Anglosphere to develop as they have. Islam has virtues (they have much, for instance, to teach us about hospitality and the care of the old). But Islamic societies have simply not managed to achieve levels of trust and law comparable to those in Christian lands. This could explain why Islam (if you discount oil) has not achieved any great economic success, why education, publishing, freedom of speech and thought do not greatly flourish under its influence - and I am sceptical of claims of Islamic paradises in the distant past.

But our advantages, like our infrastructure and our other stores of wealth, material and moral, are inherited. We are not replenishing them. We are wearing them out. We have drawn heavily on our balances and obtained a great deal of moral and political credit on the basis of a reputation won by others which we no longer deserve.

In military terms, our scientific advances have stalled, if not gone backwards. Modern TV techniques combined with the methods of ‘people power’ which are increasingly the main weapon in international conflict, have completely (for example) neutralised Israel’s former military superiority over her neighbours. In Iraq and Libya we merely demonstrated that superior physical force can destroy but not create. Russia’s genius in Syria was to use its superior weaponry *alongside* an existing polity which could make good use of airpower. Our stupidity in Libya was to lend our airpower to the forces of anarchy, who knew what they didn’t want but had no ability to take advantage of the victory we gave them.

I see no sign that Mr Trump, or anyone else in Washington or London, has yet understood this. His wild pledge to eradicate Islamist terror from the earth, at his inauguration, was actively alarming. How can any mentally coherent person make such boasts? But it is dispiritingly similar to the rhetorical ‘we will find these cowards and punish them’ view emitted by Hillary Clinton and George W. Bush, and British leaders, not to mention the French - now living under an absurd and futile state of emergency which shows every sign of becoming permanent.

Since Mr Trump so famously doesn’t read, can someone arrange for him to have a late-night viewing of Gille Pontecorvo’s brilliant, rending film (based on researched facts and thinly fictionalised) about terror, counter-terror, torture and propaganda ‘The Battle of Algiers’. Maybe he’ll miss the point. But perhaps he might get it, see what might be wrong with the Jack Bauer view of life, and so save us all a lot of trouble.

He is plainly listening to some establishment voices, even while appearing to be off the leash. This does not mean he is prepared to be sensible for its own sake (his Russian opinions, as discussed, were more sensible than those of the establishment), just that he will listen to others when the issue isn’t especially dear to his heart. As he revealed his chaotic, illogical and foolish ‘extreme vetting’ plan, Mr Trump mentioned the September 11 2001 attacks as its ultimate justification. But most of the hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt. All of these are Arab countries with which the USA maintains close military and political relations. But none of these countries was on Mr Trump’s list, which did by contrast contain Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. You got a sense of someone saying ‘OK, have your stupid immigration ban, if you must, as long as you don’t annoy these people while you’re doing it’.

Then there’s the question of whether Mr Trump should be a guest of the Queen. I find it hard to see a principle at stake here. Her Majesty has had to spend time with Martin McGuinness, with the appalling old waxworks who run China, with the Romanian despot Nicolae Ceausescu, with Robert Mugabe (and plenty of other horrors who attend Commonwealth conferences). But I think it might be wise to set the visit quite a long way off, so that we have some leverage. Mr Trump will understand that. It is Britain’s biggest asset in any bargain with Mr Trump, he really wants it, and it should not be given away until we can be quite sure we will get something in return.

Meanwhile I think events have so far shown that Mr Trump is pretty much as bad as he looked, but will moderate and restrain his behaviour whenever the issue at stake doesn’t really bother him. Not much to rejoice about but ,hey, this wasn’t my idea.

Share this article:

05 December 2016 3:45 PM

I mistrust too much anger in politics. A bit is all right, especially when the other side are telling lies or refusing to listen. But not too much. And not too much self-righteousness either, please. None of us is right all the time. That’s why we have a Loyal Opposition and an adversarial Parliament, and the presumption of innocence, come to that.

Perhaps I am just too conscious of the horrors of Civil War. I am drawn to historical depictions of these wars, by a fearful fascination. How did men of the same nation end up slaughtering each other? Could this happen among our gentle hills and woods? Yes, it could, and has. Start treating opponents as enemies, and there is no telling where it might end.

I live in a city that was besieged in such a war, and where you can still, if you look carefully, find traces of old fortifications in now-peaceful suburbs. I have read, in history and in fiction, depictions of these events, of the horrible relentless inevitability with which the two sides have first ceased to listen to each other, then turned their backs on each other and finally begun killing each other. The past, as Evelyn Waugh once said, is the only thing we possess for certain. We should pay close attention to it.

… full of pain and regret at the turning of Englishman against Englishman:

‘And the raw astonished ranks stand fast

To slay or to be slain

By the men they knew in the kindly past

That shall never come again’

You might find something a little similar in Gore Vidal’s rather beautiful description (in his novel ‘Lincoln’) of Abraham Lincoln visiting wounded Confederate prisoners of war. One of the badly-injured young men, unlikely to survive and in some pain, turns away from him in loathing and disgust. ‘Son, we are all the same at the end’, says the unhappy President, quietly. The reader alone knows how true this will be, and how soon. It is in this book that Lincoln, driven to misery and self-loathing by the carnage he must pursue to the end, rages that the very rooms in which he works and sleeps seem to have filled up with blood.

And these episodes are nothing to the Civil Wars of Russia and Spain, both in our times, adding modern weapons to pre-mediaeval cruelty. Not to mention the merciless wars of Ireland in the early part of this century, and their more recent sequels.

at the end of last week, I did not know until I was at my keyboard how very much I felt that some sort of generosity was called for. If you love your country – and this is the only real motivation for wanting its independence – then you also love your fellow countrymen and your fellow countrywomen. Therefore if you disagree with them , you seek to do so with patience, kindness and tolerance, and a readiness to listen. So what if they don't do the same? 'Render unto no man evil for evil'.

To me, for many years, the most moving part of any election has been the victor’s declaration (not always made) to serve *all* his constituents, whether they voted for him or not – and my own (Labour) MP has been an exemplary follower of this principle, to my personal knowledge. Heaven help us if it is ever otherwise.

Most sensible pro-EU people now recognise that the vote went against them and that we must therefore leave the EU.

I have mocked those who did not recognise the outcomeof the referendum and fantasised about frustrating the result, reminding them of Brecht’s joke about how, the people having failed the elite, the elite would like to elect a new people. Too bad. Once you accept the democratic principle, the majority is the absolute decider.

They, like those who wanted to leave, took part in the campaign on that basis. But of course it was never quite as simple as that , especially in a free, plural society with a de facto separation of powers, adversarial newspapers, law courts, a powerful civil service and the BBC,

Would leavers, had we lost, have accepted the vote? Yes. Would we have sunk back and given up all hope of leaving forever? I somehow doubt it. We would also have continued to seek to block many aspects of EU membership, such as Schengen and the Euro, Turkish or Ukrainian membership of the EU and any plans for a European Army.

Remainers are now doing the approximate equivalent. Do I blame them? No. What is more, they have quite a lot to work on. It is silly to pretend that they don’t. Let me explain.

Be in no doubt that there are many and varied ways of achieving the apparently simple aim of leaving the EU. And that if that aim is badly messed up, there could one day even come a campaign to rejoin the EU, which will undo all you have achieved.

One of the many odd, unsatisfactory things about the referendum is that the movement which won it dissolved itself at the point of victory. We did not elect a new government (though we destroyed the old one, which has been replaced by a pale ghost of its former self). We cannot turn to the leaders of the ‘Leave’ campaign and say ‘what exactly did you mean to do next?’, because they are scattered to the winds, some in internal exile, some hidden inside the government, some fulminating in UKIP factions.

If we could ask them, what would they say? How deeply had they thought about the matter? Did they even have a unified position? Weren’t some of them globalists who wanted Britain out of the protective embrace of the EU so it could be more open to the keen winds blowing from the far East?

Weren’t others more my sort, who value Britain’s special unique nature and didn’t want to see it absorbed or erased or diluted either by the EU or by globalisation? These aren't really allies. they have a single negative desire - to get out of the EU. But their positive plans are hostile to each other.

Then there’s the question of responsibility. Victory in an election (as those who take part well know) means that you are now personally in charge of keeping the promises you made. Victory in a referendum has no such automatic price. We did not elect a new government last June. We just robbed the existing government of the central pillar of most of its activity, and forced it to do something it didn’t want to do and will do as slowly and unwillingly as it can. There is no force in British politics which can change that.

The Leave campaigners then either went home quietly, or began writing rude memoirs about their allies, or embarked on wild political manoeuvres, only to be rolled flat by the bizarre juggernaut of Theresa May, who inherited Downing Street because she had been vague and rather cowardly, and who was given the job of implementing a policy she opposed -presumably because she had opposed it more feebly than most.

We must also wonder, given their performance for many years before in front-line politics, whether *all* the major figures in the Leave campaign were in fact wholly committed to the cause they espoused; or whether they ever intended to win. I was utterly amazed when Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson and Michael Gove declared themselves in favour of leaving. It was at that moment that my former certainty, that ‘Remain’ would win the vote, began to evaporate. I had actually argued with Mr Gove, many years before, that the main reason leaving the EU was unpopular was hat no leading politicians were in favour of it. The public therefore assumed that it was a dangerous policy. At the time, as I recall, he took the David Cameron view, that it was a marginal subject we shouldn't 'bang on' about.

Of course both sides were unscrupulous. But that's not worth worrying about. As so often, Larry Elliott of ‘The Guardian’ makes the key point very well. He disposes of Remainers’ moans about the untruths told by the ‘Leave’ campaign here

But this frivolous disregard for truth (on both sides) was partly a consequence of the irresponsibility I mention above. As soon as the campaign was over, both sides bolted back to their normal homes and loyalties, like vandals discovered in mid-crime by the police, scattering down every available dark alleyway, never to meet again.

I also have to mention the amazing predicament of the Labour Party, whose leader was ideally positioned to do as little as he could to discourage his party’s voters from registering a huge protest against mass immigration - one millions of them had been longing to make for years.

So, we have a narrow victory, based on unique circumstances, obtained largely by people who didn’t know (and hadn’t thought very hard about) what they were going to do next. Is this really a sound basis for a triumphalist parade? Not everyone on our side is brilliant and good. Not everyone on the other side is stupid or wicked. Fight them, by all means, but with reason and facts, not self-righteous rage. If the vote were held again now, it might just as easily go the other way. Is it wise to pretend to be unaware of that, or to think it just doesn’t matter?

And now, as a nation and an economy, we are up against an EU in which at least one very skilful and dogged rival, France, will do all she can to do us down. France has several reasons to do this. Her establishment wants to squash Marine le Pen’s Front National, and making an exit from the EU look hard and painful will help this process. Then there’s the little matter of the Battles of Waterloo and Trafalgar, and French resentment (shared by Germany) of the continuing dominance of the City of London in European finance. Do you think they’re going to be nice to us?

And is it really not worth noting that figures such as Christopher Booker, the most sustained and well-informed campaigner against British membership of the EU, are genuinely worried that we might damage ourselves if we seek too much, too fast? The attitude of some on this blog has been close to Stalinist in their empurpled unreasoning wrath. Any minute now I expect to hear voices accusing me and Christopher Booker of wrecking railroads and sabotage, and of being secret agents of Brussels.

Sure, economic logic dictates that they want our markets. But the EU has always been a political body, with economics coming second to politics, or how could they have agreed to merge their currencies? Politics comes first. They cannot make it easy or cheap for us to leave. There will be a price of some sort.

Finally, I’d mention (as I did in my Sunday article) the fact that the ghastly embodiment of cynicism, the Conservative Party is still in office in this country. This is a party which is very good at political murder, as Margaret Thatcher and Iain Duncan Smith could readily attest. Those Tories who push now for a hard and fast departure may find that Mrs May and her inner circle give them all the freedom they want, wait for them to fail, and then destroy them.

What might the result of that be? Let’s speculate wildly. A catastrophic failure of negotiations, a British walk-out, or a an EU refusal to concede another inch, a run on Sterling (which is waiting to happen again anyway), a humiliating return to talks (on worse terms) and then perhaps that long-threatened election, fought as a second referendum on the half-hearted deal we eventually get?

I don’t know, and nor do you. All I know is that I find the noisy, chest-thumping over-confidence of some Leavers increasingly hard to take. I think it is dangerous for the country and, regardless of whether anyone likes what I say or not, I am going to point this out.

Share this article:

I pointed out - to cries of incredulity - before the Referendum that there was no indication that its result would bind Parliament. I suggested this might offer opportunities for those who wished to stay in the EU to frustrate it. It was one of my reasons for not playing any major part in the referendum campaign, which I thought then and think now to be the wrong way out of the EU

I will be responding in a later post to various comments in my position, as expressed yesterday. In the meantime I felt I should provide details of my statement yesterday that MPs were told before they voted that the referendum would not be binding. Here they are:

The document concerned is a House of Commons Library briefing paper on the Referendum Bill, published in June 2015

It says in Section 5 on page 25 (I have inserted my own emphases):

'This Bill requires a referendum to be held on the question of the UK’s continued membership of the European Union (EU) before the end of 2017. This Bill requires a referendum to be held on the question of the UK’s continued membership of the European Union (EU) before the end of 2017.

'It does not contain any requirement for the UK Government to implement the results of the referendum, nor set a time limit by which a vote to leave the EU should be implemented. Instead, this is a type of referendum known as pre-legislative or consultative, which enables the electorate to voice an opinion which then influences the Government in its policy decisions. The referendums held in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in 1997 and 1998 are examples of this type, where opinion was tested before legislation was introduced. The UK does not have constitutional provisions which would require the results of a referendum to be implemented, unlike, for example, the Republic of Ireland, where the circumstances in which a binding referendum should be held are set out in its constitution.'

It notes that Parliament has on one occasion voted for a binding referendum, presumably implying that the EU ballot could have been made binding if Parliament so chose. I suspect that would have involved Parliament passing the legislation and making its final enactment conditional on its winning a prescribed majority in a referendum:

'In contrast, the legislation which provided for the referendum held on AV in May 2011 would have implemented the new system of voting without further legislation, provided that the boundary changes also provided for in the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituency Act 2011 were also implemented. In the event, there was a substantial majority against any change.'

As for the 1975 plebiscite, it points out:

'The 1975 referendum was held after the re-negotiated terms of the UK’s EC membership had been agreed by all EC Member States and the terms set out in a command paper and agreed by both Houses.'

The full document can be found and downloaded by searching for:

European Union Referendum Bill. Research Briefings . Number 07212 . 3rd June 2015.

Share this article:

04 December 2016 1:55 AM

Do you really think anyone in this deeply divided country has a mandate to go hell-for-leather for full immediate exit from the EU, regardless of costs and consequences? I don’t. I think we might be very wise to settle for a Norway-style arrangement, and leave the rest for some other time.

A mandate is a mandate, but only because of the strange, rather illogical magic which says that a majority of one vote decides the issue. So it does. But it doesn’t sweep away any duty to consider the defeated minority, our fellow countrymen and countrywomen, our neighbours, friends, colleagues, even relatives.

It may be that if the other side had won, they might have behaved badly towards us.

I have been in enough minorities in my time to have experienced that. But they would have been wrong to do so. And precisely because our cause is so good, we can afford to be generous in victory.

I get tired of the overblown shouting on both sides here. Anyone, even I, could see that a referendum was only the first step, and that lawyers, judges, civil servants, diplomats and the BBC would seek to frustrate a vote to leave. That’s why I always wanted to take another, longer route out. I wasn’t surprised by the High Court decision that Parliament must be consulted, and I will be even less shocked if the so-called ‘Supreme Court’ takes the same view.

The facts are on their side. MPs were told, in the official briefing by the Commons Library, that the referendum they were voting for would be advisory, not binding.

So please hesitate before condemning David Davis when he warns that we are not likely to get a clean break from the EU in the coming talks. Mr Davis understands the monster better than most, and would, I think, prefer to get us out completely. But if even he has begun to talk about a halfway deal, then that means it is the best we can realistically get. Apart from anything else, he knows very well that the Tory Party is not to be trusted in the months ahead.

He is really the only serious conservative figure in the Government. Unlike some who saw the Leave campaign as a vehicle for ambition a few months ago, he grasped the problem long before.

It is painful to recall how he was robbed of the Tory leadership by an alliance of media creeps and big money. They destroyed Mr Davis and saddled us for years with that empty vessel, David Cameron.

People are already beginning to forget Mr Cameron. They shouldn’t. First, because so many who should have known better – Tory activists and then voters – fell for his marketing. Second, because he is mainly responsible for the mess in which we now find ourselves. Try not to be fooled by this kind of person again.

And in the meantime, realise that, in these difficult times, we risk the sort of unforgiving, dangerous and destabilising divisions which are even now ripping through the USA. In such conditions, you may well get what you want, but only at a hard and bitter cost. Is that worth it?

Halfway out of the EU, which we can achieve now, may turn out to be a whole lot better than being halfway in.

Finally, a glimmer of hope from Syria

There may at last be good news out of Syria, which so many of my fellow journalists are too deluded to see. The defeat of the Islamist fanatics in eastern Aleppo now seems very close indeed.

These nasty, ruthless people, encouraged, armed and aided by the intolerant despots of Saudi Arabia and helped madly by us, have deliberately turned Syria into a desert. They have terrible things on their consciences. If they are now beaten, the long task of rebuilding can at last begin and the refugees can start to return.

Yet intelligent people here continue to swallow the propaganda of the jihadis – the only source of ‘news’ from eastern Aleppo because no independent journalist dares put himself in the power of these so-called ‘rebels’. They never ask if the pictures from eastern Aleppo are posed or staged, or if the voices they hear are independent.

They believe, without evidence or hesitation, any slander levelled at Russia, seeming to think that Russians are child-hating savages who deliberately seek to kill civilians, whereas we, when we bomb Islamists in cities such as Mosul or Fallujah (which we do), only kill civilians by accident.

Good heavens, have we already forgotten? Russians of all people know what it is like to have your land and homes attacked by ruthless, indiscriminate killers. Why do we assume they care less than us, and are less human than we are?

I forced myself to watch part of one episode of Strictly Come Dancing and was strangely moved by the performance of Katya Jones.

As she capered lightly around the lumpish, slow moving form of Ed Balls, she resembled a chipmunk trying rather desperately to make friends with a grizzly bear.

But as I watched I also realised that Mr Balls is now a potential Prime Minister. Once, he would have ruined his hopes of high office by taking part in such a thing.

But in modern Britain, almost any kind of TV fame is an advantage.

Look at Al ‘Boris’ Johnson, once a reasonably successful journalist and entertaining public speaker, now a wild superstar of politics.

It was his repeated appearances on Have I Got News For You which made him Foreign Secretary and may yet make him Premier.

They lifted him into that class of people who no longer need to explain who they are, a priceless status in politics. I know a bit about this because of my sole appearance on the same programme.

The editing wasn’t especially kind to me (they cut out one of my jokes) and the whole thing was dominated by the insufferable celebrity cook Clarissa Dickson Wright, who swelled up like a human Zeppelin whenever a camera came near her. But even so, for a few days afterwards I experienced a tiny taste of true celebrity, being recognised as that man off the telly by an astonishing range of people.

And that was after just one appearance. Mr Balls is now permanently famous, and widely liked for having been ready to make a fool of himself for the pleasure of others. Even his silly name has become a sort of asset.

He has the wit to take full advantage of this. But is it proper or right that TV executives can make a political career? I don’t think so.

**If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down**

13 November 2016 1:35 AM

I wish I thought our fashionably liberal ruling classes, throughout what remains of the free world, would learn from the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. But they won’t. They are incapable of learning anything, ever.

After years of taunting, spiting, ignoring and scorning the rest of us and our opinions, they have now created a monster. President Trump is entirely their fault. But they blame others.

I have politely warned the liberal elite for years that they were taking this risk. I have many times said and written to such people: ‘Please listen to me now. Or you will end up having to listen to someone much, much nastier in future.’

They paid no attention to my careful dissection of their wrong policies. With very few exceptions, they treated me as either mad or wicked, much as they treat your opinions and concerns.

On they ploughed with their mass immigration, their diversity and equality, their contempt for lifelong, stable marriage, their refusal to punish crime, their mad, idealistic foreign wars, their indulgence of drugs, their scorn for patriotism, their schools and universities, turning out graduates with certificates they can barely read.

And on they went with their destruction of real jobs, promising a new globalised prosperity that never came. Millions have just had too much of this.

Even now the liberals squawk and gibber in a state of disbelief. They hold daft placards saying ‘Love Trumps Hate’, as if they have not for years hated the secret, inarticulate people, living in parts of the country they never visit and barely know exist, who have finally let rip with a yell of resentment and rage.

This yahoo, this bully, this groper, a man who threatened his opponent with jail, he surely cannot be preparing to live in the White House? Yes, he is. Those pictures of Barack Obama treating him with polite respect, they cannot be true? Yes, they are.

These ridiculous people, who have never wondered how others have viewed their own side’s billionaire-financed election victories in the past, are actually holding demonstrations against the result. I loathe Mr Trump for his coarseness, his crudity, and his scorn for morals, tradition and law. I am as sorry that he has won as they are, and fear that Britain will have its own Trump before long. But I can at least say that I tried to prevent it. They brought it about. We must all now wonder if he is what he claims to be, or just another politician prepared to say anything to win office, just a bit more shameless than the rest.

Neither of these possibilities is good. If he is what he says he is, and keeps his promises, then he is bound to do grave damage to the peace and stability of the USA.

The simplest test of that will be whether he tries to put Hillary Clinton in prison, the promise he made that most pleased his supporters. If he does not, then he is like a medieval wizard who has conjured up the Devil and now does not know how to send him back where he came from.

Mr Trump has so stirred the mob that they cannot be relied on to go home if he fails them.

They want the change and the revenge they were promised.

If they see that they will not get them, they will instead rally behind figures who will make Donald Trump look like John Major.

And this campaign has done so much damage to the USA, to its tolerance, to respect for the rule of law, to civility, that there is no telling where this may stop.

*******

Surely the most moving words written or spoken by anyone in the past year were Leonard Cohen’s message to his one-time lover Marianne Ihlen, when he learned that she was dying: ‘Know that I am so close behind you that, if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.’ And so he was, as we learned on Friday.

Set that beside the florid, bombastic attempts of politicians and preachers to move us, which fail. Note that almost every simple word has only one syllable.

What makes it so powerful is that he meant it.

*********

Yes, it's bitter - but Amy's new thriller is utterly brilliant

As long as you keep your eyes closed through the opening credits (which feature several rather large naked women doing performance art), by far the best film of the year is Nocturnal Animals, starring Amy Adams, left, and crammed with real suspense.

As a bonus, the film is also a strong, if bitter, argument in favour of constancy and fidelity, things Hollywood hasn’t always been keen on lately.

Brace yourself for a cold, dark winter

This could be the winter when our crazed policy of closing coal-fired power stations and building windmills finally produces the power cuts that we richly deserve. In a way, I hope it is. It might make us wake up before things get much worse.

Green dogma is quite a bit dafter than the beliefs of the Mormons that fashionable people like to mock. That is why I call these fanatics ‘Warmons’.

But it has taken over the minds of our politicians and civil servants to such an extent that – on this issue – our official policy is as crazy as anything in North Korea.

Let me sum it up. On the basis of an unproven theory about global warming, we are shutting down perfectly sound, high-capacity, coal-fired power stations and instead peppering the country with windmills that tend not to work when it is cold.

This is unhinged anyway. But since China builds a new coal-fired power station every few weeks, and we share the same atmosphere as China, this action does no good, even if you believe the theory.

In any case, our ability to cope with big surges of demand in a cold winter gets less all the time. Our nuclear generators are near the end of their lives.

France’s nuclear stations, which often fill the gap by sending French power under the Channel, are having problems of their own just now.

It could be that the only way to meet demand will be by activating reserve banks of diesel generators now on standby, perhaps the most polluting form of power there is.

The closure of coal-fired stations should stop now, and we should also immediately build new gas-fired plants in defiance of the Warmon fanatics. Our exit from the EU actually makes this much easier.

If you want to comment on Peter Hitchens, click on Comments and scroll down